A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

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Tag: New York Times

Former Vice President Dick Cheney … said President Obama is likely to be a one-term president because his policies are unpopular with the public.

“His overall approach to expanding the size of government, expanding the deficit, and giving more and more authority and power to the government over the private sector,” Mr. Cheney said in an interview with Jamie Gangel for NBC News. “Those are all weaknesses, as I look at Barack Obama. And I think he’ll be a one term President.”

What is it about the editorialists at The New York Times? Again today they’re ridiculing the decision by the new House to begin its business yesterday by reading the Constitution aloud. On Tuesday, with great pomposity themselves, the editors called the anticipated reading “a theatrical production of unusual pomposity.” Then in a nasty little editorial today entitled “The United States Consti …tion” — that’s not a typo; that’s their headline — they criticize House leaders for deciding not to read the “obsolete or offensive” parts of the document that are no longer law due to subsequent amendment. The Constitution was read, that is, as it exists today, which hardly seems surprising.

But it’s far more than surprising to the Times, apparently, because this “rewriting of history” deprives us of yet another opportunity to wallow in the unpleasant episodes of our past, as the Times and its followers so love to do – American unexceptionalism and all. Indeed, those offensive provisions “were written by a group of men that many in the Tea Party and elsewhere seem to consider infallible and nearly divine.”

It’s hard to make this stuff up; you have to simply quote it. Which brings us to the point of the editorial: What really troubles the Times, you see, is that Republican leaders “missed a chance to demonstrate that this document is not nailed to the door of the past. It remains vital precisely because it can be reimagined.” Well, yes, we have “reimagined” the Constitution from time to time — by amendment. But that’s not quite what the Times has in mind. No, the editors grant that the Constitution “was a work of political genius” (despite those offensive parts?), but “largely because its authors handed its interpretation to the open minds of posterity.” Through amendment? Well, not entirely, or even mainly, in today’s context. In their Tuesday piece, they revealed their hand — hardly a surprise — when they spoke of constitutional text “that the founders wisely left open to generations of reinterpretation.”

So it’s not just by amendment that we change our fundamental law: that’s how the Civil War generation removed offensive parts, legitimately; and that’s how women got the vote. But there’s another way to amend the Constitution, too — by “reinterpreting” its text. That’s how the New Dealers did it, as I discussed in this space yesterday and have more fully elsewhere. After Roosevelt’s infamous Court-packing threat, a cowed Supreme Court turned the Constitution on its head: by reading shields against power as swords of power; by turning a Constitution for limited government into one of virtually unlimited government. That’s fine with the Times. It’s not with the people the Tea Party sent to Washington, and that’s why the Times has them in its sights. What the Times champions is not constitutionalism. It’s politics. They won’t say it. We will.

The New York Times’ “Room for Debate” website is once again hosting a forum on education, to which I have contributed some thoughts. The topic: whether there should be federal tax credits for home schoolers.

I won’t rehash my contribution – obviously, you can read it right on the site – but I wanted to respond quickly to two other entries.

The first is from Chester Finn, president of our favorite conservative sparring partner in education, the Thomas B. Fordham Instititute. I just want to thank him for substantiating a warning I offer in my contribution: Create federal home-schooling credits and don’t be surprised if you also get requirements that home schoolers be judged on stultifying standardized tests. It’s exactly what Finn calls for:

In return for the financial help, however, home-schooled students should be required to take state tests, just as they would do in regular school, charter school or virtual schools. And if they don’t pass those tests, either the subsidy vanishes or the kids must enroll in some sort of school with a decent academic track record.

The second person I want to respond to is former Bush II official Susan Neuman, who generally offers the right advice by warning even more starkly than I did that home schoolers demanding tax credits are making a deal with the regulatory devil. That’s fine, as is her reporting that by what indications we have “children who have been home-schooled do remarkably well, attending well-respected colleges and universities and going on to successful careers.” Unfortunately, all that was preceded by the Reductio ad Hitlerumof education debates: Smearing any effort to even the playing field between public schools and other educational arrangements as an “attempt … to destroy public education.”

I know that this will never catch on with people determined to preserve public schools’ near-monopoly on tax dollars no matter how well other arrangements actually educate children (not to mention serve taxpayers and society overall), but it is time to stop treating public education as if it is synonymous with public schools! Indeed, you demonstrate more dedication to public education if you fight to get kids access to the best education wherever it is offered than if you make your ultimate goal preserving government schools. Yet the monopoly defenders insist on smearing choice advocates as being at war with public education.

Stop with this trashy tactic. Wanna say supporters of educational choice are at war with public schools? Fine. But with public education? Sorry – if anything, they’re the ones truly fighting to get the best possible education for all.

The editorialists at the The New York Times are out of sorts this morning over a Tea Party backed constitutional amendment that would give state legislatures the power to veto any federal law or regulation if two-thirds of the legislatures approved. Despite the backing of incoming House majority leader Eric Cantor and legislative leaders in 12 states, the proposal has little chance of succeeding, the Times avers, “but it helps explain further the anger-fueled, myth-based politics of the populist new right.” Indeed, it expresses “with bold simplicity the view of the Tea Party and others that the federal government’s influence is far too broad.”

Well? Isn’t that what the election last month was all about? But right there, for the Times, is the problem: “In past economic crises, populist fervor has been for expanding the power of the national government to address America’s pressing needs. Pleas for making good the nation’s commitment to equality and welfare have been as loud as those for liberty.” With the Tea Party, however, the tables have turned. What most troubles the Times, it seems, are Tea Party signs that say “We Want Less!”

And nowhere is that better captured than when the Times speaks of “the mistaken vision of federalism on which [this amendment] rests. Its foundation is that the United States defined in the Constitution are a set of decentralized sovereignties where personal responsibility, private property and a laissez-faire economy should reign. In this vision, the federal government is an intrusive parent.”

If that vision is “mistaken,” so too, apparently, were the Founders, because it was their vision as well. To be sure, the Constitution they crafted held “competing elements, some constraining the national government, others energizing it,” as the Times writes. And true also, the government they shaped was meant “to promote economic development that would lift the fortunes of the American people” – but mainly by securing the framework for liberty, the rule of law, not by pursuing prosperity through government programs. In particular, the Framers believed in personal, not government, responsibility; private, not collective, property; and a free, not a planned, economy. And they left most power with the states, where it would be exercised responsibly, or not – something to keep in mind as we watch our “failed states” asking Washington (read, the other states) to bail them out.

As President Obama prepares to release a review of American strategy in Afghanistan that will claim progress in the nine-year-old war there, two new classified intelligence reports offer a more negative assessment and say there is a limited chance of success unless Pakistan hunts down insurgents operating from havens on its Afghan border.

The reports, one on Afghanistan and one on Pakistan, say that although there have been gains for the United States and NATO in the war, the unwillingness of Pakistan to shut down militant sanctuaries in its lawless tribal region remains a serious obstacle. American military commanders say insurgents freely cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan to plant bombs and fight American troops and then return to Pakistan for rest and resupply.

The findings in the reports, called National Intelligence Estimates, represent the consensus view of the United States’ 16 intelligence agencies, as opposed to the military, and were provided last week to some members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. The findings were described by a number of American officials who read the reports’ executive summaries.

Obviously, any predictions about the future course of the Afghan war should be taken with a couple shakers of salt. However, the fact that the U.S. remains at war nine years after intervening suggests that pessimism is the most realistic perspective.

In The New York Times, Robert H. Frank of Cornell University repeated his perpetual argument that high tax rates on the rich do no harm to demand (not supply) because the rich can just draw down savings, year after year, to pay more taxes yet maintain a showy lifestyle. Then he resorts to the old trick of asserting there is no “credible” evidence that tax disincentives and distortions have any ill effects on the economy.

Frank asks, rhetorically, if an increase in top tax rates might reduce economic growth. And he replies, “There’s no credible evidence that it would.” This is a timeworn trick among people too intellectually lazy to look for a single academic study or statistical fact.

To simply assert “there’s no credible evidence,” however, is much worse than distorting the facts.

It amounts to claiming that he has the ability and the right to suppress facts not to his liking.

Over the past year I have repeatedly cited several major studies showing that pushing the highest marginal tax rates even higher is extremely dangerous to economic growth; Stanford economist Michael Boskin lists half a dozen of them in his latest Wall Street Journal op-ed.

For Mr. Frank to assert that such studies are not “credible” simply reveals his own inability to find credible evidence to support his own untenable position.

We are told constantly that government can play a beneficial role in the marketplace by taking steps to make sure consumers are more fully informed about the risks of the goods and services they use. But what happens when the government itself helps spread health and safety information that is false or misleading? That question came up recently in the controversy over New York City’s misleading nutrition-scare ad campaign, and it now comes up again in a controversy over a new database of complaints about consumer products sponsored by the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).

As part of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA), Congress mandated that the CPSC create a “publicly available consumer product safety information database” compiling consumer complaints about the safety of products. Last week, by a 3-2 majority, the commission voted to adopt regulations that have dismayed many in the business community by ensuring that the database will needlessly include a wide range of secondhand, false, unfounded or tactical reports. The Washington Times editorializes:

…[Under the regulations as adopted last week] anybody who wants to trash a product, for whatever reason, can do so. The commission can leave a complaint on the database indefinitely without investigating its merits “even if a manufacturer has already provided evidence the claim is inaccurate,” as noted by Carter Wood of the National Association of Manufacturers’ “Shopfloor” blog….

Trial lawyers pushing class-action suits could gin up hundreds of anonymous complaints, then point the jurors to those complaints at the “official” CPSC website as [support for] their theories that a product in question caused vast harm. “The agency does not appear to be concerned about fairness and does not care that unfounded complaints could damage the reputation of a company,” said [Commissioner Nancy] Nord.

Commissioners Nord and Anne Northup introduced an alternative proposal (PDF) aimed at making the contents of the database more reliable and accurate but were outvoted by the Democratic commission majority led by Chairman Inez Tenenbaum. Nord: “under the majority’s approach, the database will not differentiate between complaints entered by lawyers, competitors, labor unions and advocacy groups who may have their own reasons to ‘salt’ the database, from those of actual consumers with firsthand experience with a product.” Commissioner Northup has published posts criticizing the regulations for their definitions of who can submit a report, who counts as a consumer, and who counts as a public safety entity.